Abstract

Political and public focus on equity and justice outcomes of public policies is on the rise all over the world. Equity is both philosophically motivated and often decreed by law and in planning directives to be monitored when policies are changed, however oftentimes these equity assessments are vague, qualitative and carries low weight in policy decision processes. For the public transport administrator, all decisions on operations, fare management and subsidies have distributional consequences forming the equity outcomes of public transport provision. In this thesis distributional outcomes of public transport subsidies, fare schemes, transport quality provision and public transport accessibility are studied quantitatively. New methodology is developed with regard to assignment of subsidy level per individual trip, graphics on geographical fare distribution and a measure of vertical distribution. Some findings are that public transport subsidies have low horizontal but high vertical equity, that flat fares – contrary to much of the literature- have high vertical equity when cities have high income residents living centrally. Women place higher weight on crowding as a quality issue, older passengers put both higher weight and higher satisfaction on low time variability while young passengers are less satisfied with and places lower weight on personnel attitude. And that accessibility, controlled for how densely populated and central the residence-area is, has a vertically equitable distribution.